Preparing students and families to thrive in the gene age

Junk DNA in the human genome, Jim Kent.

Description:

Interviewee: Jim Kent.
Junk DNA in the human genome.

Transcript:

It's not clear how much of the genome is doing anything. We know that about one percent of it seems to be involved with actively producing proteins, sort of the moving parts of the cell. But then what the rest does is fairly mysterious. We get a little bit of a handle on this by comparing it with the mouse and from mouse comparisons and seeing what's conserved between mouse and human. It looks like, you know, perhaps five percent is serving some function. And some of that is things that we know about. Some of it is involved with turning genes on and off, rather than the actual genes themselves.